Neal Hersh

Hersh Mannis

Neal Hersh is a rare breed of trial lawyer whose service never stops, even when relaxing in the evening with a glass of Scotch. ‘I don’t want any client stewing overnight about something when I could have spent five minutes on the phone while I was smoking my pipe and relaxing,’ he says. ‘I could have made his or her situation more at ease.’ He rose to fame through helping Robin Givens divorce Mike Tyson in 1989. Soon Hersh found himself ‘representing every actress in Hollywood’, involving huge sums. ‘We have a case at the moment where one side says, “I owe you nothing,” while my side says, “You owe me close to $1 billion.”’ It’s been a ‘fascinating’ four decades for Hersh, who says of family law: ‘It’s interesting but also challenging. You’re learning a million things – and you never stop.’ His early career was ‘serendipitous but fortuitous’: he trained under the late Simon Taub, ‘the godfather of divorce in Beverly Hills’, eventually setting up Hersh Mannis in 2000. ‘In the Eighties, clients would gravitate from New York to Los Angeles,’ he says. ‘I decided I would build my reputation and practice in California.’ Now cases cross borders even more easily, and Hersh reaches out to UK lawyers, namely Farrer’s, who have cases ‘all across the EU’.

You are in control of the communications you receive from us and you can update your preferences anytime to make sure you are receiving information that matters to you.
Please check our Spear's Magazine Privacy Policy to see how we protect and manage your submitted data.